XP

P4 3ghz

2gb RAM

XP seems to be throwing a wobbly lately and is now not recognising DVDs. Seems OK with CDs though.

Any ideas?

Mine has just stopped recognising my extra HDDs via the USB2 card, but still recognises them via it

XP

P4 3ghz

2gb RAM

XP seems to be throwing a wobbly lately and is now not recognising DVDs. Seems OK with CDs though.

Any ideas?

Have you had other things stop working lately? I have had one or two minor issues in the last fortnight were I have had to reinstall drives and stuff. Just wondering if MS has screwed up my PC with its latest

Still has USB2 drivers that are not showing as in error?

My DVDs are showing an error, it just doesn't recognise them :confused:

Also fast user switching and the login screen screensaver have stopped working. Just comes up with a win2k login box instead of the XP one.

Hmm - any recent updates done? It kinda sounds like 'require ctrl-alt-delete for logon' has been enabled, which kills the fast user switching.

Screen saver wise I dunno exactly.

It's worth dropping a spybot S&D scan over the box, and an AdAware one too, see if they find anything nasty. Cookies aren't generally nasty etc, but there are often loads of toolbars etc that may have caused grief.

There may be a rootkit installed (worst case) because some of Sony's DVDs came with that on. Hopefully will find something

ctrl-alt-del does nothing at all, ever now :(

right pain to get to taskmangler :(

Task Manager can also be started by using:

Ctrl-Shift-Esc

It does sound like you have some kinda fairly serious problem though, as ctrl-alt-del is fairly low level in windows to protect against nasty stuff happening.

Hopefully the key combo above will help you a bit - will try if any of the IT guys at work have seen this before and post back tomorrow

I had a similar problem a while back. The PC would not recognise my CD or DVD drivers. I had to go into the bios on start up and go to the options where the drivers were featured. For some reason something had altered the settings and all I did was reselect the drivers as the option was saying there were none at all.

Hope this makes sense. Might not be your problem, but its more advice all the same.

HTH Paul:)

Had you been on the Internet before ?

Weeks ago I visited a site for certain 'programs'. Inadvertently I'd forgotten to Disable Active X. Quick as a flash 'funny' things started to happen - I knew something had been downloaded as a StartUp Monitor program advised me a certain program suddenly wanted to run at start up. I tried to kill the new running processes with Task Manager. "You do not have Administrator privileges" - I do. I killed computer - rebooted, tried to use Task Manger - same message. Tried to delete new files - couldn't. Ran AdAware - unable to delete files.

Finally had to resort to using my latest Norton Ghost backup to get things as they were before.

This may not be your problem - but in case for future security read this little lot -

Arovax Shield | Detects and Notifies you about all the Major online threats tried to penetrate your System, Isolates & Removes them.

I have installed the program (freeware 2 MB - only downside seems to be XP takes around 5 mins to shutdown now) and had no problems but to be on the safe side I disable ActiveX (some sites need it - so I enable it for trusted / known sites - then immediately disable it again).

Does sound like something has got in that shouldn't have. On top of spyware removers etc. I'd also recommend running your anti-virus software and run a full scan (everything - all files) just to make sure.

ctrl shft esc, nope, does nowt.

Adaware scan shows all OK

Pest Patrol shows all ok

Spyware doctor shows all ok

Spyware blaster shows all ok

Spybot S&D shows all OK

Kapersky av is always up to date, scans on boot and full scan weekly - all OK

:confused:

Just remembered another funny that it is doing:

When you boot up, you need to login as soon as you can. Leave it more than 1 minute and when you type your password in it tells you it needs to activate windows :confused: If you tick yes, it obviously can't as there is no net connection (you are still on the login screen) so it says can't be done at this time and just sits there. Only option is to power off and try and log in quicker :grumpy:

Basically I think it is FUBAR, but I really really don't want to have to rebuild (too many apps installed and I don't want to have to re-install).

Try running CCleaner from:

Download CCleaner 1.38.485 - filehippo.com

Clean up your system and registry, could be some bad things hiding in your registry.

A good little program.

I'll give that a go tonight.

As you can see from the little list below, I am fairly paranoid about stuff being downloaded They all run on a weekly basis and most load in to memory on start up so I'm a bit bemused that something got past:

Adaware SE

Pest Patrol

Spyware Doctor

Spyware Blaster

Spybot S&D

Zone Alarm Pro

Kapersky av

I'll give that a go tonight.

As you can see from the little list below, I am fairly paranoid about stuff being downloaded They all run on a weekly basis and most load in to memory on start up so I'm a bit bemused that something got past:

Adaware SE

Pest Patrol

Spyware Doctor

Spyware Blaster

Spybot S&D

Zone Alarm Pro

Kapersky av

theres paranoid and then theres crazy. Do you have any resources left to actually use the pc at a reasonable speed. All you need is windows defender and a decent virus scanner like nod32 and job's done.

Sounds to me like you have some sort of nasty malware/spyware on your machine. I have seen the issue with not being able to bring up task manager before on someones machine. It was pretty naffed once it got to that point. I would click on start -> run then type in msconfig I would then go to the startup tab and disable near enough everything you have in there especially if its named funny or points to a directory you are unaware of.

Give it a reboot and see if your task manager works by pressing ctrl+shift+esc. If it does then backup your documents and pics, mp3s etc, then wipe the thing and re-install xp fresh.

I lost my CD drives when I installed a recent Nero 7 update. Windows reported for both:

Windows successfully loaded the device driver for this hardware but cannot find the hardware device (Code 41).

There is an article in Microsoft KB about deleteing upper and lower filters to solve this problem but it didn't work for me. I eventually resolved it by uninstalling Nero 7 Premium. I now use RoxioEasy Media Creator 9 Suite.